Infochimps offers a broad assortment of API sources and retrieval formats. This document will review some of the commonalities between them and step through some of the options for interacting with our platform. Much of this should be familiar for developers experienced with other API platforms.
Since we have so many disparate data sets, make sure to reference the individual API pages for specific usage requirements.
Parameters
Infochimps APIs accept parameters as HTTP key/value pairs. The following list contains some of the common options.
Required
| &apikey= | A valid API key is required to use all Infochimps APIs. | Details |
|---|
Optional
| &_limit= | Restricts the number of results that print in your call, the default is 100. | &_limit=1 |
|---|---|---|
| &_from= | dictates the starting point | &_from=300 |
Responses
All Infochimps API responses will be in JSON format, and will look something like this:
{
"name" : "value"
"name" : {
"name" : "value"
}
}
Error Codes
| 200 (Success) | The query ran successfully. Note that search queries that return no values will have this response code. |
| 400 (Bad Request) | A bad endpoint, or a bad parameter name/value. |
| 401 (ApikeyNotFoundError) | Your API key is either incorrect or missing. |
| 403 (UserNeedsLicenseError) | Our traffic cop, Buzzkill, says this API requires a license and that the account tied to your API key hasn't agreed to it. |
| 404 (Record Not Found) | For queries involving a look-up of a particular value, for instance "&id=32", which is not an ID found in our data store. |
| 500 (Internal Server Error) | Something went wrong on our side. |